Section 29.9 Google Search
Note: as of 2022-10-27 we have search supported by an online service from Google and a client-side (“native”)version supported by Javascript (Section 29.8). Development and support will favor the latter.
Search facilities can be enabled through Google Custom Search Engine 1 . Please, please report any discrepancies in the following instructions as the setup interface at Google changes out from underneath us. These instructions have been updated as of 2020-10-01.
Besides being useful for search facilities, setting up a search engine might be a good way to alert Google of something newly available, and initiate your book’s rise up the search results rankings.
- Create an account with Google (GMail, YouTube, etc.) and make sure you are signed in.
- Provide a URL for the top-level domain name/directory for your book/document. Everything below this will be indexed. We have taken some care to mark knowl content in a way compatible with the search facility, but there is more work to do here.
- Give the engine a GCSE-specific name, so you can tell later which one it is when you have several.
- Under
Edit Search Enginein theBasicstab locateSearch engine IDwhich has a string that uniquely identifies your new search engine. Save this, you’ll need to make it part of your PreTeXt document. - Under the
Userstab add co-authors or trusted backup personnel. - Fiddle with
Edit Search Engine > Look and Feelat your own risk! Only the defaults are tested and supported. - Provisions for removing advertisements for non-profit sites seem to have changed. If your university already contracts with Google, you should investigate having a “SuperAdmin” at your institution so this setup for you, and make you a trusted collaborator. Then it should be an easy matter to turn off advertisements.
- Because these sign-ups are dependent on your site, this is a publisher activity, and hence configured with the publication file (Section 26.1), see Subsection 44.4.10 for details.
- The
Search engine IDyou saved from above is referenced in Google’s code as acxnumber. An example looks like482cf73dc05bed674(older examples looked like002673997130187229905:qjo2y0jplyu). In which case your publication file would have an element underhtmllike<search google-cx="482cf73dc05bed674"/>
- The
search/@google-cxattribute will alert the PreTeXt conversion and fully enable and implement search. You are done, and everything should just work. You should see a Google-branded search box to the top right of each of your pages. (We have no control over the branding.) - Time to rebuild your HTML output and make the improved version available.
cse.google.com/csecse.google.com/cse
